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  • Photographs of the Child in Canadian Pictorial from 1906 to 1916A Reflection of the Ideas and Values of English Canadians about Themselves and "Other" Canadians
  • Loren Lerner (bio)

This study focuses on the many photographs of children published in Canadian Pictorial, an illustrated English-language magazine produced monthly in Montreal between 1906 and 1916 by the Pictorial Publishing Company. In its ten-year run, the magazine strongly advocated "the educational value of pictures" and exalted the advantages of photography for depicting a wide variety of subjects and themes of "peculiar and vital interest to Canadians." Three years into its publication, the editors boasted that Canadian Pictorial was "Canada's Popular National Illustrated Magazine" with subscribers from every part of the country, as well as from the British Isles and the United States. "In its chosen field" the magazine was a "leading educator," reaching "nearly a hundred and fifty thousand people, old and young … regularly taking pleasure and profit from its pictures, month by month."1

The editors insisted that this "high-class illustrated periodical," which featured photographs of people of all ages taking part in all kinds of events, had become to Canadians "what the Graphic and Illustrated London News are to Great Britain."2 However, unlike these two weekly British journals, which contained editorial comments, feature-length reports, summaries of social events, and other articles typical of a newspaper, Canadian Pictorial, with its emphasis on pictures of children, obviously catered to the Canadian family. Besides brief captions that accompanied the photos and a cursory overview of news and views, every issue featured regular columns such as "Women and Her Interests," "The Toilet and the Baby," and "The Housekeeper's Page," and occasionally the magazine printed short stories that mothers could read to their children. [End Page 233]

In fact, much like the British and American women's magazines such as Ladies Home Journal and Canadian Home Journal that proliferated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Canadian Pictorial was dedicated to imprinting the public's consciousness with specific ideas about family life.3 This endeavor was in keeping not only with women's magazines but with other genres that interpreted social and cultural values, including etiquette and "conduct" books and treatises on homemaking. Further, although the editors and most of the writers of Canadian Pictorial were anonymous, they generally embodied the voice of English Canadians of British origin. I argue that the goal of the magazine was to uphold the ideals of Canada's Anglo-Saxon Protestant citizens who originated from Great Britain and to educate Canadians from non-British backgrounds to be like them. The magazine was strongly affiliated with two similar publications, Montreal Witness, "a clean newspaper" and "by far the most influential paper in Canada," and Northern Messenger, a religious journal meant to be read by the whole family. The close relationship between the periodicals could be detected in the advertising section of Canadian Pictorial, where advertisements for the magazine were usually placed alongside promotions for Northern Messenger and Witness.4 The expectation was that readers would recognize that Canadian Pictorial's values and opinions were consistent with the characteristics of these other publications.

Many types of children are presented in Canadian Pictorial's images, including royal children, boys and girls in rural environments, French Canadians, recent immigrants, and First Nations and Inuit people. For the purposes of this essay, the method of examining these images involves an iconographic and iconological theoretical framework based on Erwin Panofsky's explanation of how to interpret the content of images.5 In his writings, he makes a distinction between iconography, which is the subject matter of the images, and iconology, which is the interpretation of the works. He explains that images can be explored using a systematic outlook organized into three levels. The first consists of the basic identification of the image and the historical conditions and events that affected its forms. The second consists of the iconographical analysis, in which particular images are associated with themes, concepts, and conventional meanings that originate in the history of particular motifs. The third, which is the iconological interpretation, provides the deepest understanding of the image, particularly its symbolic value as...

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